Pathfinder Society Scenario #6–22: Out of Anarchy (PFRPG) PDF

Several years ago, rebellion in the seaside town of Pezzack resulted in a Chelish blockade to slowly starve the rioters into submission. Since then few have entered or left, trapping the increasingly desperate citizens with little with which to repair their broken homes and eke out a living. When the Society learns that an important informant still lives in the ruined town, the PCs must smuggle themselves into Pezzack, navigate the devastated urban landscape, and extract their contact—all without igniting a new rebellion and inviting Cheliax’s unfettered wrath.

Content in “Out of Anarchy” contributes to the ongoing storyline of the Dark Archive and Liberty’s Edge factions.

Written by Garrett Guillotte.

This scenario is designed for play in Pathfinder Society Organized Play, but can easily be adapted for use with any world. This scenario is compliant with the Open Game License (OGL) and is suitable for use with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.

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Average product rating:

Excellent roleplay scenario, rough on the execution

The Good:
- Strong open-ended play that allows players to do whatever they wish. Not much railroading here.
- Interesting characters and locations, with helpful box text to give the GM a feel of how to portray NPC's.
- Fun plot
- As a GM, I find this quite re-runnable. Would run again.

The Bad:
- Some poor execution especially around combats. To be fair, there isn't much combat in this scenario and that's a good thing. However, the combats that do happen are either poorly balanced or altogether so unnecessary that they are a waste of time. I skipped a few of them because of how pointless they were. The whole scenario would have been improved if all the combats except the boss fight were removed, and the boss fight re-tweaked to give players an actual challenge.

I honestly have no idea how to give this a fair rating.

This is the first review I did not leave a rating for. Everything in this scenario works, more or less, but it's such a bloated mess that you can't run this without heavy railroading. In short, this could've been a module with all the fights and twists and turns this scenario takes. You have roughly half an hour to spend on each location, maybe even less, while almost every location is interesting enough for longer roleplay.

In all honesty, this is an amazingly written scenario. There are some weird turns and fantastic NPCs to interact with, and the author has a clear knack for writing interesting characters. But it's simply too ambitious for what it needs to be. The "twist" is really weird and needlessly frustrating if the GM doesn't literally spell out the main guy's name

I can only say that this is a great scenario if you have the time to look through it and trim the fat. Otherwise, stay away from it at all costs.

Great potential, but would work better as a module

I ran this scenario with approximately 10 minutes prep time. It turns out that the two other scenarios I had prepared had already been played by the other players. When I started reading through it, I was extremely worried because of the many moving parts and the sheer complexity of it. Once I actually started running it, however, it turned out to be a boatload of fun. Despite some initial confusion in part A, the party had a great time roleplaying it. After that, however, things went downhill fast. Due to my lack of prep time, it was a good 2 1/2 hours before their first combat.

I certainly feel like, with a good GM who knows how to improvise, along with a lot of preparation time and the full 5 hours, this would be a full five star scenario. The only problem that I found was the complexity of the module, and the writing of the scenario was also confusing.

I would greatly recommend this scenario for an experienced GM and a party of people who like to both roleplay and participate in semi-complex combats.

Terrible

The writing of this scenario was a complete mess. I had to pretty much hold the players hands because they were just confused by the npc name. Also the editing was horrible as sections would completely just skip over what was actually going on.

Description and details in what you gave the players were just a jumbled mess. I assume some of this was because of word count description. It really need a bit more polish for something that had some really good potential.

Potential for fun story asphyxiated by whale blubber

(Title is a brief homage to one of the best RP points of the scenario that my players had tonight)

This scenario is basically the chapter on Pezzack taken right out of the Campaign Setting book. As such, the story is good, the NPCs given solid descriptions and agency and their own agendas, and the "feel" of the setting is rather well done.

That's about all I can say about this scenario that is good. To put things in perspective - tonight was my 320th GM table in PFS, and this is only the second time in over 4 years that I did my first read-through of a scenario and went "Ya know, I really don't want to run this."

(For reference, the other was when someone handed me Race for the Runecarved Key for the first time at GenCon 2012 and asked if I felt comfortable running it on ~30 minutes notice)

The PCs can literally sleep at location A1 for 2 days, doing nothing else, and have almost the exact same chances of getting full XP, PP, and Gold as if they had gone through all of the nearly pointless hoops this scenario throws at them.

I imagine from the player's side that it's not too bad, since until after they're done, they don't know that the GM is tracking influence points after every single thing they do (thank god for the folks who posted checklists and/or guides to pfsprep.com) which have almost no effect on anything in the scenario.

Heck, the four factions - ostensibly the most important mechanic to navigate, only changes the flavor of who asks you to do encounter C and who attacks/helps you at D. These events are virtually unchanged regardless if you interact with the factions at all or not.

In an effort to be clever, the PCs are given a "coded message" that correctly points them at the location in part A that will provide them the answers they seek. A smart party will think to go there first, and then have no use for any of the other elaborate mousetrap-games in the other part A locations (mine did, and almost felt cheated that they got the only information they really needed from their very first foray into town, and spent the rest of part A exploring for the heck of it since they had 2 days in-game to kill before something scripted happens).

The possible question area contains an important clue, or at least something to go on. "What’s Poppo’s message?" But there is nothing in the intro text about a message. The message is actually from Olandil only apparently relayed through Poppo.

The whole influence thing has no clear indication in the player text boxes. Influencing also has little impact on the story and it seems like most groups will just try to cover all the locations gaining roughly the same points for all with a slight advantage to the Loyalists. Then the faction mission parts are not separated out enough to figure out they are not part of the main story. They are also incomprehensible as to who these people are and why they should know about them.
Very poorly written and very difficult to make this one fun I found.

While prepping, I had to reread the it 4 times to even really understand the influence stuff. It was very very confusing. Unfortunately, not enough players to run, but I knew from just reading the adventure and reviews, it would run long.

But the last section was hilariously awesome! I wish they'd do more escapes like that!